In the body, fiber plays many important roles. It slows the rate of digestion and absorption of food and helps regulate blood sugar. It helps lower blood cholesterol. Fiber also promotes a feeling of fullness and helps a person maintain a healthy weight.
It is generally recommended that humans intake about 25 grams of dietary fiber for a 2,000 calorie per day diet. Nonetheless, many humans are not getting enough fiber in their daily diet and fall well below this target. One way to boost fiber intake is to add fiber to baked goods.
Adding fiber to baked goods however presents many challenges. Cellulosic fibers, for example, give an unpleasant cardboard flavor and texture to consumer baked good products. Moreover, fiber's water-holding capacity impacts the extrudability and machinability of a batter or dough used to make a baked good as well as the mouthfeel and moistness of the baked product.
To overcome such challenges, several commercially-available high-fiber baked consumables contain a significant amount of flour and/or hydrocolloids. Flour, and in particular wheat flour, contains gluten, the protein responsible for giving structure to flour-based formulas. Gluten gives breads, cakes, brownies and other baked goods their soft, spongy texture.
However, millions of people do not tolerate gluten. This group includes people with celiac disease, or those who are allergic or intolerant to wheat. Gluten-free baked goods are commercially-available and to compensate for the lack of gluten, these products generally contain one or more additional ingredients such as starch, gums or other forms of hydrocolloids. The addition of starch, gums, or other forms of hydrocolloids to commercially-available baked goods can however raise the cost of manufacturing.
There exists a need therefore for an extrudable batter that is flourless and gluten-free yet is still usable for making a shelf-stable, ready-to-eat high-fiber baked good that substantially maintains a desired shape, structure and moistness after baking without using starch or hydrocolloids to compensate for the lack of flour.